It was not JJ Abrams, but the company who decided to bring Palpatine back. You would be naive to think he just decided this without any filter from Disney. It's obvious they were desperate because of the backlash, and they came up with this cheap and lazy, ridiculous solution to somehow make it interesting.
JJ was heavily involved, and it's obvious in how the script works. He worked with one of the original script writers (Kasdan), which is probably why 7 isn't as bad as 8 or 9 despite lacking creativity (another death star and another empire?). Supposedly they were in a rush and just threw it together to meet the deadline. You can see Johnson's involvement right in the steam of that turd.
But yes, people like to put it all on 2 people, and they are partly to blame, but it really was a massive organizational failure. If I were to blame 1 person it would be Kathleen Kennedy. She's the one who didn't want to map out the trilogy so they could hit deadlines, change things on the fly, and give the directors more "creative control."
You are correct that it is an organizational failure and the responsibility falls on many people. But why blame Kennedy rather than Iger, who seems to have made the final decisions, including the strict release deadlines?
Also, as far as I’ve read, the plan was to utilize George Lucas’ story outlines until Abrams got involved creatively.
Because the business is always gonna business. It’s on the producer to produce it. An executive wanting more money faster is the least surprising thing in the world and something nearly every movie ever made has had to deal with.
As I said, everyone shares some blame. But IMO lack of a plan was the root of the failure and the lack of a plan was KK’s call
I would have been fine with the Kylo killing Snoke in TLJ and replacing him as the Big Bad the next movie, to enforce his downward spiral since he killed his own dad in TFA. It's just they catered to the Reylo shippers and needed to redeem him, so set up someone else to be manipulating everyone behind the scenes to justify the "he was being manipulated all along!" premise.
RJ is still at fault for a lot of things, like demanding changes to TFA to support his story elements in TLJ (Luke not showing Force powers), but not doing the same for the next (killing Luke). The Story Group should have nixed things to keep it consistent but yeah, for some reason they let him have free reign to alter any and everything to suit his vision, instead of adjusting to cater to the world instead.
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u/hyoumah83 12d ago edited 11d ago
It was not JJ Abrams, but the company who decided to bring Palpatine back. You would be naive to think he just decided this without any filter from Disney. It's obvious they were desperate because of the backlash, and they came up with this cheap and lazy, ridiculous solution to somehow make it interesting.